Chinese and Comparative Philosophy 中國哲學與比較哲學

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Global Philosophy, www.globalphilosophyresources.com, provides easy to use resources for faculty members who are interested in diversifying their teaching but who lack training in nonwestern philosophy. We are looking for contributors.

Philip Clart (Leipzig) maintains a useful list of the Chinese names of scholars who publish primarily in Western languages. If your name is not on it, please contact Prof. Clart, who would be glad to add you!

Richard Smith’s kind offering of his bibliography made me think that it
might be worthwhile mentioning the H-Buddhism Zotero Bibliography (which
has a fair number of entries on Confucianism, not to mention China).

Zotero provides useful tools on the web site, but of course, it is an
even much more powerful tool if you figure out how to run Zotero locally
in Firefox. If anyone was ever motivated to start a similar project for
Confucianism, he or she could go a long way in seeding it by simply
exporting the Confucianism entries from our project. Smith’s
bibliography could also be converted and imported fairly easily.

We presently have it set up so that anyone can view it, but only members
can edit, because we want to keep the content scholarly. If you’d like
me to send you an invite to join, just write me.

I’ve just become aware of New Frontiers of Asian Scholarship, a resource hosted by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, posting reviews of Asian-language scholarly books. There are a few philosophy books, and a variety of other interesting materials.

As Chris has recently reminded us, ctext is a terrific resource, both in terms of its textual coverage and the many innovative features that Donald has added to it. Currently it has some very useful coverage of the Song-Ming era, but for anyone looking for more texts from Neo-Confucian authors, I can recommend the Hong Kong Society of Humanities site (click on the 宋明哲學經典 link), which I have just added to our list of resources.

If you work with early Chinese texts, you have probably used the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), a wonderful on-line resource created by Donald Sturgeon some years ago while he was still a master’s student in Taiwan.

To many of us, within two or three years of its founding, ctext.org had become a more convenient and useful research tool than the online e-text resources created by large institutions such as Academia Sinica. As Donald has continued to expand the site’s functions — such as by adding a dictionary and concordance indexing — its utility has overtaken that of any rival Chinese text database, online or not.

Often, while working on a book chapter or essay, I have multiple browser windows open displaying different pages of content from ctext.org. I’m sure many others in the field use the site the same way.

All that useful content takes up a lot of server resources, however, which someone has to pay for. For years now, that someone has mainly been Donald himself. He’s had a few welcome anonymous donations and a handful of short-term sponsors, but by and large the costs for the site come out of his own pocket. And that’s not counting all the time and programming expertise that he’s put into it.

So a graduate student living on a modest stipend in one of the world’s most expensive cities is paying for a valuable research tool that all of us use.

May I suggest that those of us who can afford it — not graduate students, but professors and other interested readers — consider donating to support the site’s operations? You can do so through Paypal on the site’s support and donation page here. To those of us who visit the site frequently, the Chinese Text Project is worth much more than the cost of a book and probably more than the cost of most of the software on our computers. So why not consider donating an amount equal to the price of a book or a software package to support the continued operation and growth of this invaluable resource?

And if you’re in a position to do so, consider arranging for an institutional subscription to or sponsorship of the site, as described here.